I blog and this blog is about blogging. So you can see that I am keen on blogs, bloggers and blogging. But for some, in fact for many, blogging is not right for them. This short article gives you a number of reasons why you should think carefully before you start to blog.
What you mean I can't blog
Reason 1: You don’t get quick results
There are occasional stories of people making it big on the internet. They’ve come up with a great idea, such as the million dollar home page, where a British student, Alex Tew, sold the million pixels on his website for $1 per pixel. It was a simple, but brilliant idea and justifiably did extremely well.
However, the reality is that most people have to work at making their mark on the net. Your blog needs to have been around for a time to get picked up by customers, by other bloggers and the all important search engines.
The days of just bunging up any old thing on the internet and getting lots and lots of visitors has gone. So a few short blogging posts will not bring the world to your doorstep or site.
Reason 2: A blog requires a bit of work
A good blog requires quite a bit of work. It needs to have regular posts which are well written for the target audience. This does mean that you require some motivation and dedication.
But there again you do not have to kill yourself. There are many successful bloggers who post maybe just once a week. You can also start off slowly say maybe once or twice a week writing and posting your articles.
Reason 3: A blog can be disheartening at first
As chairman Mao said. ‘A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step forward.’
A blog starts with one post. The writer then needs a number of posts before people can really get an idea of the structure of the blog and people take him seriously. The number of viewers in the first few days and the first few months will be low. It can take a year or more before you’ve got a reasonable readership.
Many blogs fail as the owner gets disheartened and stop posting.
Reason 4: A blog may not be the solution
You are not selling your product or service. Your company is in trouble. The solution is not a blog. A blog supports other activities, such as marketing, customer service and sensible pricing. It is not as stated above the quick fix.
Get off your backside and start building up lists of potential customers and then email them, phone them and network with them. Then use a blog to inform them, provide customer support and tell them of the additional spending opportunities they have with your business.
Reason 5: A blog can be distraction
You can, I do, spend a lot of time tinkering with the layout. Sitting at your desk thinking great thoughts of the brilliant post that will shake the world, but never gets written.
You can write a post, refine it, change it, think about it, rewrite a section, search for hours looking for the image – which then means you have to rethink the layout of the post and could I just change this or add that. I PLEAD GUILTY YOUR HONOUR. And Mrs Odtaa asks me if I’ve been to the bank, done the shopping, cut the grass or any of the 1001 things I’d promised to do.
I also find that doing a little bit of background research on the net for a post can be very time consuming. You look for a specific link. You don’t find it but you find another interesting link which leads to an hour and a half journey and the post still hasn’t been finished.
Reason 6: Your blog can harm you
When my daughter was at junior school I used to help out with the fun raising events. The chair of the committee was a management consultant and as we were preparing for the annual summer fete he started the meeting, as he probably does in business, with two rude, crude, poorly told jokes. He lost the entire audience. We worked with him because we wanted the fete to work and it was too late to remove him. But he was off the committee the moment the fete was over.
Similarly if you are writing a blog be aware of your targets. Pictures of girls in bikinis might be appropriate if you are writing a blog for a laddish audience. The pictures will kill you dead if you are trying to develop a blog on something serious.
There is also the concern that as it becomes known that you are writing a dubious blog this could affect your career or standing in the community. The most famous case being Deidre Clark, who wrote a blog describing sex, drugs and dodgy parties by rich ex-pats living in Moscow. She got sacked, has a publisher who want to turn the blog into a novel and there’s a high level wrongful dismissal court case with her old firm, Allen & Overy.
But it’s not all bad
If you have thought through what you want to do with a blog then it can be useful: as a boost to a business or website, to build up your reputation in a particular field or to possibly earn some extra income.
However, you do need some planning, persistence, be able to promote the blog and be aware that a blog normally takes quite a lot of time to build up a decent readership readership.
Links
For a more positive view on blogs start here: The wonderful world of blogs
Over to you
Hopefully I haven’t put you off. If I have tell me and I haven’t tell me.